Mapping American Social Movement Through the 20th Century

This collaborative project features maps and other visualizations showing the chronological geography of dozens of social movements that have influenced American life and politics during the 20th century, including radical movements, labor movements, women's movements, many different civil rights movements, environmentalist movements, and more. Includes interactive maps of more than 1,500 underground, alternative, and other kinds of unorthodox publications from the decade between 1965 and 1975.

Abstract: -

Project Description 2016:This collaborative project features maps and other visualizations showing the chronological geography of dozens of social movements that have influenced American life and politics during the 20th century, including radical movements, labor movements, women's movements, many different civil rights movements, environmentalist movements, and more. Until now historians and social scientists have mostly studied social movements in isolation and often with little attention to geography. This project allows us to explore the relationships between social movements by bringing them together in time and space. It enables new understandings of how social movements interact and how they reproduce and change over time. We do this by developing detailed geographic data and metrics about each movement, allowing us to identity locations where membership and activism were concentrated.

The links lead to more than 80 visualizations and data tables, with more to come. We have started with dozens of maps and charts that show the activist geography of the NAACP, United Farm Workers (UFW), Socialist Party, Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Communist Party, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). We are now working on SNCC, Black Panther Party, the Chicana/o Movement, and underground newspapers from the 1965-75. The National Woman's Party and NOW are next. We will add data and maps for other organizations as we move forward.